


Canto I

by kmo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Allusions to cannibalism, Angst, Bedannibal in Europe, F/M, Gratuitous Dante, post-mizumono
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 08:18:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2685767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bedelia lives in paradise with the devil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Canto I

**Author's Note:**

> I really love Bedannibal in all their permutations, from sexy Murder Couple to crack and angst. This story is a bit of a darker, but perhaps more canonical, take on their relationship.

Bedelia sits on the terrace, late afternoon sunlight warming her bare forearms. A breeze ruffles her hair, gentle as a lover. The ring of stainless steel and the smell of fresh basil and garlic are a subtle reminder of Hannibal’s presence. Her mouth waters at the same time that her stomach turns. She has long since stopped asking where the meat comes from and Hannibal has stopped telling her. Her gaze returns to the book in her lap, tracing the outline of familiar ideas in foreign words.

_Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_  
 _mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,_  
 _ché la diritta via era smarrita._

Dante’s verses in her undergraduate years had seemed so distant as a clever girl whose unwritten future held all the promise of a blank page. Now they felt altogether too immediate. She closes the book and sets it aside, unable to concentrate. She raises her eyes to the vista in front of her, all of Florence spread out before her like a picnic blanket, postcard perfect. From their villa near the Belvedere, her gaze could travel unobstructed across terracotta roofs to the twisting ribbon of the Arno and the city beyond where the Duomo sat, squat and brooding like a mother hen. Hannibal adored the Duomo, spent hours sketching it in lavish detail from the god’s-eye view of their terrace. Bedelia thought it bombastic and overdone—rather like Hannibal himself.

She has come to prefer the church of San Miniato, much older and far less grand. It unfortunately could not be seen from their east-facing balcony, hidden as it was in the hills behind their home. Bedelia had spent many hours there, some in the company of Hannibal but increasingly more on her own. Miniato was an early Christian hermit who had been beheaded by order of the emperor in the 3rd century. After his execution, legend states that he picked up his head and carried it with him across the river, up into the hills until he came to rest at the exact spot where his shrine still stands. It’s a ludicrous story, she knows, one the agnostic in her would once have easily laughed off. But, these days she often feels a great deal like San Miniato. By all rights she should have died months ago in Baltimore. She’s been among the walking dead ever since.

A large masculine hand touches her deftly, possessively, fingertips gliding up the row of tiny buttons on the back of her sundress. She smiles gently to cover her mild annoyance. He rarely lets her alone, even when they are at home together, as if too much time with her own thoughts would cause her to mutiny. Or worse, disappear.

“I thought I might join you for an _aperitivo_ before dinner. Campari orange?”

“Please,” Bedelia acquiesces. Her drink is the purplish-red of a new bruise, and tastes more bitter than regret. She keeps hoping to acquire a taste for them, but never does. How unsophisticated of her.

Hannibal samples his with relish. They are silent together for a moment. There is so little to be said and so much. In the daylight, she occupies a space halfway between a hostage and a security blanket. She prefers their time together in the dark, all sighs and moans and hardened muscle against yielding flesh. There, in the place where thought disappears, primal instinct takes over, her sympathetic nervous system amoral in its search for pleasure and release. And if her desire makes her more animal, Hannibal’s nearly humanizes him. He washes up in her bed like a shipwrecked sailor, thirsty, starving, and forlorn.

He eyes her choice of reading and asks, quite droll, “ _Inferno_?”

“We are in Dante’s city. It seemed appropriate.”

“Midway upon our life’s journey, I found myself in a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost,” he quotes perfectly from memory, his oddly-accented English giving the verses a macabre depth. A savoring smile tugs at the corner of Hannibal’s lips and his eyes shift to match the maroon of the drink in his hand. “Do you feel like you are in hell, Bedelia?”

“Hardly.” A dry, hollow laugh erupts from her chest. Her life with him is something plucked from the pages of _Condé Nast_ —box seats at La Scala, sunset cruises on Lake Como, traipsing through sun-dappled vineyards on the arm of a handsome bachelor. A life that would have made her acquaintances back in Baltimore sick with envy. Or perhaps merely just sick. According to Tattlecrime.com, an epidemic of eating disorders was running rampant through Baltimore’s high society in the wake of Hannibal’s reveal as the Chesapeake Ripper.

No, her life with Hannibal wasn’t hellish at all. She was living in paradise with the devil himself.

“You feel lost, then.” Hannibal’s voice is quiet and there is something that might be called sympathy in it.

“Don’t you?” she asks, answering his question with another question, a skill she had perfected from her days as his psychiatrist.

He pauses thoughtfully, drains the last of his Campari in the same bracing way he had done on the airplane over. Now, like then, he reaches for her hand and squeezes it affectionately. Unlike then, he raises it to his mouth and presses his cheek to her palm, kissing the vulnerable inside of her wrist. “Lost, perhaps. But not alone.”

Hannibal’s desire not to be alone is the thin thread that keeps her clinging to life, hanging on like San Miniato. A dying ember she must nurture and coddle to keep alight if she wishes to survive. It exhausts her. 

He moves behind her, pressing a kiss to her temple, a mark of ownership as well as a gesture of tenderness. “Come. Dinner is served.”

She follows him into the dark of the villa, suffocating her fear and horror, murdering her nagging conscience.

With Hannibal, the straightforward path lead only to death.


End file.
